Status report

I have no great news to report. I am just staying at the work before me.

I have a solid first draft of the second chapter of Larger than Life. There’s still plenty of room in it for later additions and refinements as the whole novel progresses. Since it’s an early chapter, it is likely that I’ll need to do some stage setting there as later story developments reveal themselves. It also is a key place for the presentation of my protagonist’s character, so as I come to understand him better, I may want to go back and leave some other hints.

Chapter three is well started. I have more than 1700 words already in place for it. Some of the other characters get a little development here, and the key plot of the story finally gets introduced. Yes, chapter three is a little late to be introducing the plot, so let me amend that. A key subplot of the story gets introduced in chapter three. The novel is mostly a character study, with events happening to my protagonist, as they would to anyone, that show how he changes over time. Plus, as I noted in an earlier post, chapter one is going to be radically different from the rest of the novel, so it doesn’t really count (and the subplot gets introduced there in a different way anyway).

So Larger than Life has “swollen” to more than 7,000 words. That feels pretty good for a fellow just getting started. I think the necessary momentum is there.

As for The Sleep of Reason, I have no news to report. The three agents who asked for completes or partials have not gotten back to me yet — it hasn’t even been a month for the oldest — and no new rejections have come in. I continue to send out queries, though not at the pace I had before. Based on my poking around in AgentQuery, there are still hundreds of potential agents for the novel, so I can stay with it for a long, long time.

A few short stories have suggested themselves to me in recent days. Urgently suggested themselves. I think they’re good ideas, but they need to gestate for a while, so I’ve added them to the score of other short story ideas I’m keeping notes on. Sooner or later one of them is going to force itself upon me and make me write it. I also have a half dozen short stories out as queries here and there. One is so long past the site’s reported response date — and I have sent the requisite follow-up email — that I’ve given up on that submission and sent it to a couple of other places. Maybe I’ll get some happy surprises soon.